What does it mean to marry or not to marry, to become or to be married, to stay married – or not – over many years? How do women and men reflect on these different states and experiences? On the one hand, so ubiquitous, much-discussed and apparently conventional as to seem hardly worth new exploration, on the other, fraught with contradictions and paradox – what are we to make of contemporary marriage? In spite of widespread anxiety about the demise of the modern family, exemplified in rising divorce and non-marriage rates as well as falling fertility levels, marriage nevertheless remains popular. Moralistic talk about marriage and the family is not confined to Western contexts but occurs in many parts of the world, including Malaysia, from where the ethnography in this book is drawn, and other Asian countries. Notwithstanding such concerns, weddings continue to be a central life course ritual (and major expense) for many people around the world – as witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic when the impossibility of celebrating marriages publicly was the subject of bitter disappointment. Marriage, in short, has not gone away either as an institution or as a subject of literary, cinematic, social, personal or familial interest. It remains an abiding public and private concern, as well as a central relationship in many people’s lives. This is one starting point for this book.

In the sociological and anthropological imagination, marriage often seems to encapsulate many unspoken assumptions. But what are we really talking about when we talk about marriage? How are marriages located in a particular place and at a particular historical moment? Embodying conservatism, continuity and conventionality, marriage may seem devoid of obvious interest for those focused on political crises and change in the contemporary world. Indeed, recent anthropology of kinship and relatedness has often left it to one side in favour of more obviously contemporary concerns, such as assisted reproduction, technology, LGBTQ activism or migration. A second starting point, then, is that much of what we, as social scientists, think we know about marriage is built on assumption rather than close scrutiny. It might yet be possible to consider this seemingly too-familiar institution in new ways.

One under-examined assumption is that marriage reacts to rather than initiating or constructing change. We assume that marriage, as a conservative institution, changes in the face of external pressure rather than itself generating wider change. In this view, political crises, technological developments, health or activism captivate anthropological interest as apparent sources and indicators of social transformation. Kinship and marriage (merely) respond to such forces. In this book, I show how marriage, rather than simply reproducing what was there before, is itself a site of creativity and innovation.

But how does marriage produce or reflect continuity or rupture between generations and the connections and disjunctions between personal, familial and wider social and political settings? To answer this question requires a close-grained scrutiny of marital experiences – something that anthropologists of relatedness are well-placed to provide. The kinds of innovation and creativity that I consider here are small-scale, occurring in intimate or familial realms and difficult to discern. But over time, they have incremental effects that travel beyond individual relationships to families and communities, and to wider publics and polities. Indeed, I argue that marriage may be a potent source of political transformation. This is not of course to say that the experiences which generate these shifts are inherently positive. On the contrary, it may well be the case that negative experiences, for example, of abusive or violent relations, have a greater potential to generate changes in perception and values about how relationships ought to be conducted than positive ones. There are examples of these in the chapters that follow.

This brings me to a third starting point for this book. Perhaps the most obvious sign of a deep shift in values regarding marital and other personal relations in many (but not all) parts of the world is the acceptance and legal institution of same-sex marriage. This profound change, which not many would have predicted even a few decades ago (see, for example, Borneman Reference Borneman1996, Reference Borneman1997), can hardly be attributed to a single cause.Footnote ¹ It is implausible to suggest that it has come about simply through the enforcement of a political or legal statute. Instead, we need to account for the alterations to moral values that have made such a major transformation to a seemingly normative institution widely desirable and achievable. And at the same time we should consider other, parallel shifts in values concerning personal and gendered relations that suggest patterns to how change occurs. But there are parts of the world where same-sex marriage is deeply resisted or the subject of bitter contestation – Malaysia, from where the ethnography in this book is drawn, among them. I suggest that we need to explore the realm of personal and familial relations anthropologically to better understand these institutionalised and often highly polarised processes – without omitting negative experiences as part of this story.

Marriage, as Chapters 3–7 of this book show, is the site of much moral and imaginative labour as conjugal partners and members of their respective families grapple with its everyday relational problems. Indeed, it might be considered unique as an institution in the way that it draws ‘others’ into a close realm of intimacy. Because it brings together spouses and their relatives, who may have more or less familiarity with each other, from backgrounds that may be more or less similar, marriage requires planning and consideration of different priorities and points of view – as the often fraught arrangements for weddings attest. But after the rituals have been completed, on a more everyday level, this moral and imaginative work continues – albeit with more or less positive outcomes, and often with considerable gendered imbalance – as conjugal partners accommodate (or not) to each other, making compromises or holding their ground at different times and on different issues, and sometimes subject to abuse or threat. This everyday, ordinary and ongoing, moral labour, which is closely linked to the way marriage requires accommodating others in the intimate zones of familial life, is not generally hidden from view – on the contrary, it is the subject of much consideration and reflection. Contrary to the impression given by some of the recent literature on the anthropology of ethics (as discussed later in this chapter), moral labour does not centre only on heroic figures grappling on their own with ethical conundrums, but with people who are thoroughly embedded in relationality. And yet the implications of this ethical and imaginative work for marriage – and for kinship relations more broadly – have hardly been considered by those concerned with the anthropology of kinship and relatedness.

To grasp the nature and import of this moral and imaginative labour requires exploring how people consider and reflect on their own marital experiences and those of others they know comparatively through time – a terrain perhaps more often inhabited by novelists and filmmakers than anthropologists. It requires a close familiarity with protagonists and the contexts in which they live. In this book, that context is Penang, Malaysia, a place I have been familiar with for more than forty years. I take up this long engagement – my own, more personal starting point – alongside the unexpected parallels between marriage and anthropology in Chapter 1. Penang, as I explain there, has many special attributes. One of these is its unusually diverse demographic composition and cultural heritage. This ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural diversity makes it a particularly apt location for a study of marriage that focuses on the ethical and imaginative work that marriage entails. Marriage across lines of religious, ethnic or class differences requires explicit imaginative and moral labour. Such boundary-crossing and its concomitant ethical and imaginative work can hardly be ignored in Penang. But the moral dilemmas confronted by the protagonists of this book – of whether to diverge from parental paths, or how closely to follow conventions, of grappling with uncertainty, insecurity and infidelity, whether to stay with or leave a marriage, whether to transgress social boundaries of religion or ethnicity or to come out to parents – are not particular to Penang. Readers will be familiar with many of them from their own lives. In this way, though strongly anchored in particular personal biographies and social contexts, the arguments of this book are broad and general.

Continuity and Difference in Marriage

The accounts of two women in Penang – I will call them Lydia and Haryath – about their own and other marriages in their families have stayed with me through the writing of this book. Lydia was of mixed Chinese-Malaysian and British background; Haryath came from a Sikh family. Both were in their mid-fifties and well-placed to reflect forward and backward in time. In different ways, their narratives touched on many of the themes of this book, and I return to their stories again in the Conclusion to draw together these intertwining themes. Each of them spoke to me about marriages in different generations of their families to explore both continuities and contrasts with their own. Their reflections underlined how considering and experiencing a marriage is a process of comparative evaluation with other similar or dissimilar relations over time. For Haryath, a sister’s unhappy marriage, which had ended in divorce, was evoked as a negative example of what to avoid. Lydia was more eloquent about the continuities in her family and about marriage as a creative partnership involving family and work. But here too a negative example – in this case of her maternal grandmother’s troubled relations with her in-laws in the early part of the twentieth century – seemed to exert a powerful hold on her own marital imaginary. Explicitly in Haryath’s case, and more implicitly in Lydia’s, both accounts evoked a tension in marriage between convention and nonconformity. In many respects, the marriage of each of them could be seen as in keeping with the norms of their respective families and communities. But Haryath spoke eloquently of ‘breaking the rules’ and ‘running red lights’ in her marriage, and Lydia’s artistic and creative endeavours, as well as her mixed background, had laid a trajectory of less conventional possibilities within marriage as what she called ‘a working partnership’. There is an implication here that conventions and rules implicitly carry their own potential disruptions, which we will meet again in Chapter 6.

The productive potential of comparative reflection about marriage over time and generations is at the heart of this book, as is the tension between the conventionality that marriage appears to embody and the possibility of doing things differently within it. It is the significance of these entwined and seemingly muted processes, which together express the continuity and change of marriage, that I explore in this work. The accounts of marriage to which I listened in Penang convey the trajectories of families through time. Talking about marriage, as Lydia’s and Haryath’s narratives made plain, involves reflecting on family life, often over several generations. These reflections were mainly, initially at least, elicited in response to my questions, but the enthusiasm and expansiveness of responses underlined how my enquiries resonated with the concerns of those I spoke to and interviewed. Respondents talked of matters to which they had clearly already given thought, and which they seemed to enjoy relating. Their narrations encompassed judgements about how things were done in the past, and how differently – or similarly – they are done today, or might be done in the future. This evocation of the past, present and future – the multiple temporalities of marriage (Carsten et al. Reference Carsten, Chiu, Magee, Papadaki and Reece2021; Maqsood Reference Maqsood2024, 68) – articulates and contributes to the continuity of kinship. Processes of kinship are at least partly about ensuring the persistence of families and property (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2008, Chapter 1), even if this aim may not necessarily be successful. In this way, they have reproduction in the broadest sense at their core.

Continuity in kinship rests on a balance between reproducing sameness – which, at the limits, would create stasis – and producing difference – which, at the limits, would be the antithesis of continuity. Marriage has a crucial place here in the reproduction of families, balanced as it is between these two poles.Footnote ² In the accounts of marriage that are articulated in this book, there is a tension between sameness and difference, a tension more commonly articulated in the anthropological literature as between endogamy and exogamy (see, for example, Carsten Reference Carsten1997, Chapter 7). If marriage necessarily introduces new and different elements into the zone of the close family, too much difference poses a threat to the values and integrity of existing family life and sometimes wider communities, while too little difference may pose other challenges – of boredom, sameness, stultification or, at the extreme, connotations of incest (Lévi-Strauss Reference Lévi-Strauss1969 [1949]). Striking the ‘right’ balance (Clark-Decès Reference Clark-Decès2014) of difference and sameness, often expressed in idioms of complementarity, marriage carries with it possibilities of transformation – personal, familial and political – alongside what may be experienced as the comfort and assurance of continuity. What we often see as ‘continuity’ in kinship thus inevitably encapsulates change. Marriage has a crucial role in the reproduction of difference, which is a requirement for both change and continuity. The moral and imaginative labour of marriage is thus partly about finding the right balance of continuity and difference that makes change bearable and sustainable over time, and sometimes over generations. As Ammara Maqsood writes, ‘Marriage is one such intimate site where difference does not collapse but becomes a means through which people relate to one another, evaluate their relationships, and make sense of their lives’ (Maqsood Reference Maqsood2024, 60). Time may enhance the possibilities for changes to endure and to ripple out from one marriage to others. In the stories of individual marriages and families recounted by Lydia and Haryath and others in this book, we can observe how these somewhat abstract considerations are experienced and expressed by individuals in the most immediate, emotionally salient and visceral ways. They are at the heart of many people’s everyday and intimate experiences of life, both their difficulties and what they most value. Lydia’s evocation of the vicissitudes of her grandmother’s life or Haryath’s more veiled allusions to her sister made clear that kinship continuity can be lived as violence and threat rather than offering the comfort of familiarity. Conjugal relations may provide negative models of what to avoid rather than the stuff of emulation.

The recurring touchstone of creativity that was present in Lydia’s account (in her own marriage as well as that of her parents) gave pause for thought. Creativity and a working partnership were at the heart of Lydia’s marital story, as was the case for many others without necessarily being so clearly articulated. In her narrative, marriage emerged as an encounter with difference that occurs on the smallest and most intimate scale but contributes to, and is part of, larger historical change. The marriage of Lydia’s parents in the 1950s had incorporated and was lived alongside the geopolitical shifts of the Cold War in the form of the ‘Malayan Emergency’, which had brought Lydia’s father to Malaya from England on his compulsory military service at the very end of the colonial era. Building a life there after his army service, his encounter with Lydia’s mother, from a Chinese and working-class background, led to a marriage that at least partly encapsulated a rejection of some of the forms of colonial and immediate post-colonial relations, which embargoed marriage across ‘racial’ lines.

Marriage, as I argue here, is a close encounter with difference on the most intimate scale that carries with it the seeds of social transformation as much as the trappings of conformity. These contradictory qualities are amplified through the deceptively obvious dual nature of marriage as at once a private, intimate relation and a public one. Both transformation and conformity matter, and they co-produce each other just as the private and public aspects of marriage do. But partly because anthropologists and sociologists often interpret marriage – and indeed kinship – largely in conservative terms, I have tended in this book to emphasise the transformative possibilities of marriage. While marriage is the focus of this study, it should be clear that the argument pertains to kinship relations more generally – partly because of the centrality of marriage to kinship, but also because the generative qualities of ethical imagination that I describe apply to relatedness more broadly. Rejecting assumptions that prioritise the state as the driver of political change, and the separation of the domains of kinship and politics on which this model rests (see Carsten Reference Carsten2004; McKinnon and Cannell Reference McKinnon and Cannell2013b; Thelen and Alber Reference Thelen and Alber2018), I explore how familial worlds can, sometimes, imperceptibly and gradually, engender social transformation.

The Anthropology of Marriage: A Short Prelude

Since anthropology’s nineteenth-century beginnings, marriage has held a central place because of the way it brings together economy, law, property, religion and kinship. Rather than providing an exhaustive account of the extensive literature here, I pick out some key points relevant for the discussion that follows (see also Carsten et al. Reference Carsten, Chiu, Magee, Papadaki and Reece2021, 6–13). Nineteenth-century social theorists, such as Henry Maine, Lewis Henry Morgan, John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Engels, concerned with the late Victorian ‘woman question’ or ‘marriage question’ – a set of debates about women’s rights, property and divorce – saw marriage as a political institution rather than an individual one. Their discussions, cast in evolutionary terms, were part of the British and North American societies in which they lived. These discussions can be considered too as part of the backdrop to some of the classic mid-twentieth-century anthropological studies of marriage, which were explicitly articulated against this evolutionary framing, but continued to consider marriage as a central social institution, and were concerned primarily with its political and economic importance (see, for example, Evans-Pritchard Reference Evans-Pritchard1951; Fortes Reference Fortes1949; Lévi-Strauss Reference Lévi-Strauss1969; Radcliffe-Brown and Forde Reference Radcliffe-Brown and Forde1950). The protagonists in anthropological debates at the time argued fiercely about the primacy of principles of ‘descent’ versus ‘alliance’ (in other words, relations between different generations of kin as opposed to those between groups that were connected through prescribed marital alliances). Today, these differences seem in many ways less significant than what they held in common – a firm understanding of marriage as a social institution that concerned groups rather than individuals and a close attention to formal rules governing choice of spouse in societies where marriage took place between related groups.

To a considerable extent, mid-twentieth-century anthropological scholarship on marriage ignored the implications of marriage for gender relations as well as the more intimate aspects of relationality. Not surprisingly perhaps, the rise of feminist anthropology in the later part of the twentieth century coincided with a shift away from consideration of the structural aspects of marriage and kinship in anthropology to a study of gender relations. What has been termed ‘the new kinship studies’ was built on the insights of feminist scholarship concerning the denaturalisation of gender, procreation, bodily substance, blood and ideas about nature (see, for example, Carsten Reference Carsten2004; Franklin Reference Franklin1997; Franklin and McKinnon Reference Franklin and McKinnon2001; Strathern Reference Strathern1992; C. Thompson Reference Thompson2005). Much of this work, however, focused on processes of reproduction and birth rather than on what earlier generations of anthropologists would have considered core institutions of kinship, such as marriage (Carsten Reference Carsten2004; Lambek Reference Lambek2011).

In more recent studies of marriage and the family, it has become conventional to view marriage as an affective relation of egalitarian intimacy based on love and to see a shift from obligation to choice in conjugal relations as a fundamental attribute of modern subjectivity (Giddens Reference Giddens1992). The increasing emphasis on affective relations between individuals, a shift ‘From duty to desire’ as Jane Collier (Reference Collier2020) has aptly termed it, is one important aspect of these changes (see also Abeyasekera Reference Abeyasekera2021; Cole and Thomas Reference Cole and Thomas2009; Hirsch and Wardlow Reference Hirsch and Wardlow2006; Jamieson Reference Jamieson1998; Padilla et al. Reference Padilla, Hirsch, Munoz-Laboy, Sember and Parker2007; Peletz Reference Peletz2023). The proliferating literature has illuminated how love and intimacy intersect with other contemporary dynamics, including migration, transnational marriage, capitalism and consumption, changing gender relations and values of equality (see Andrikopoulos and Duyvendak Reference Andrikopoulos and Duyvendak2020; Boellstorff Reference Boellstorff2007; Brettell Reference Brettell2017; Charsley Reference Charsley2012; Charsley and Shaw Reference Charsley and Shaw2006; Constable Reference Constable2003; Reference Constable2010; Reference Constable2015; Yan Reference Yan2003). Anthropologists and other social scientists have recently also turned their attention to increasing rates of delayed marriage or non-marriage that correlate with other kinds of shifts, including increased education and changing patterns of employment, especially for women (Davidson and Hannaford Reference Davidson and Hannaford2023; Inhorn and Smith-Hefner Reference Inhorn and Smith-Hefner2020; Jones Reference Jones2005). These newer patterns are apparent in the ethnography in Chapters 2–7.

While anthropologists and sociologists have focused on love and intimacy, whether in the context of marriage or not, this scrutiny paradoxically sharpens our understanding of what Perveez Mody (Reference Mody2022) has termed the ‘politics of love’. As she concludes in her perceptive survey of the recent literature on love and intimacy,

This crucial insight, that the apparent ‘privatisation’ of intimacy and its lack of political import under modernity are illusory, brings us back to the institutional and legal framing of love, its surveillance and legitimation and hence to marriage – broadly defined to include the changing definitions of what is or is not permissible in a given context.

In the narratives that I draw on in this book, love is sometimes in tension with familial ties, but protagonists are quite unlikely to ignore the latter. Partly because many of those I spoke to could be viewed as coming from families whose members have lived ‘modern lives’ in urban Penang for several generations (see Barker, Harms and Lindquist Reference Barker, Harms and Lindquist2014; Lewis Reference Lewis2016) and yet were also thoroughly immersed in the obligations of family life, I examine the implications of these seemingly contradictory pulls. This requires an attentiveness to the relations between marriage, generation and historical transformation, but in a more modulated sense than the sharp dichotomy suggested by theories of modernity (see McKinnon and Cannell Reference McKinnon, Cannell, McKinnon and Cannell2013a).

For anthropologists and sociologists who have been keen to pay attention to the relation between rules and actual practice, as well as to generations and change, and to marriage as a ‘juridical field’, the work of Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1977; Reference Bourdieu1987; Reference Bourdieu2008) has provided a generative theoretical touchstone over several decades. His influence is clear in several important studies that consider the changing economic, legal and property considerations of marriage and its affective registers (see Clark-Decès Reference Clark-Decès2014, 58–59; Collier Reference Collier2020, 12, 24; Peletz Reference Peletz2020b, 49, 97–100). Isabelle Clark-Decès’s work on Tamil marriage is an outstanding example of how a restudy of a classic anthropological case of preferential close kin marriage (so-called ‘Dravidian kinship’) can illuminate the changing nature and the lived reality of marriage practices. Her work, showing the subtle implications of this type of marriage for status, and for affective ties, while still attending to its formal rules, bridges continuity and change in terms of both its subject matter and its anthropological approach. Such scholarship has provided stimulation for the present study, but I have also started from somewhat different and broader questions – as outlined earlier – and I have incorporated different kinds of material, including the work of historians, as well as keeping in mind the insights provided by literature and film.

Marriage as Ethical Work in/on Time

Considering the recent anthropological literature on changes to marriage practices, I have found particular inspiration in the work of Perveez Mody (Reference Mody2008) on love marriages in Delhi and Asha Abeyasekera (Reference Abeyasekera2021) on ‘self-choice’ marriages in middle-class Colombo. Both authors show the considerable capacities of families to absorb transgressive marriages and demonstrate the degree to which their protagonists assign importance to, and are embedded in, familial relations. In this way, they provide powerful critiques of a stark binary of arrangement versus choice. Abeyasekera’s approach – in particular, her foregrounding of narratives, life histories and intergenerational accounts – bears many similarities with this book. There is in addition a thematic overlap with her work in terms of marriage, morality and modernity, but there are also differences of analytic terms, emphasis and focus. I am less explicitly concerned with the relations between individual agency, modernity and the production of gendered selfhood in my analysis. Instead, I bring together imagination and the ethical or moral to underline more strongly how judgements are not necessarily foreclosed in advance by pre-given moral scripts but may be generative and flexible.Footnote ³ Further, I focus more on experiences of being married than on choices about whom to marry. These divergencies arise partly from the questions we are asking (as well as discussion of the causal weight to ascribe to narrative, see Chapter 1). While Abeyasekera ‘use[s] the lens of marriage to capture in miniature social transformation in Sri Lanka from the early twentieth century to the present’ (Abeyasekera Reference Abeyasekera2021, 177), in this book, the central question is ‘what does marriage do, and how?’. In this way, the resulting studies may be seen as complementary.

The accounts of Lydia and Haryath, as of many others in this book, illuminate how considering a particular marriage is intertwined with comparative judgements and assessments of other marriages – those of parents, grandparents and siblings or of children, nieces and nephews, for example. As I discuss later, and as was evident in Lydia and Haryath’s stories, when people consider their own marriages, or those of relatives or consociates, they exercise ‘ethical imagination’ (Rumsey Reference Rumsey and Lambek2010, 117)Footnote ⁴ as they explore how intimate relations should be lived in comparison to other marriages, past and present, with which they are familiar. I argue that this is a creative process resting on the consideration of possible alternative, different ways to live rather than simply based on the imposition of pre-given moral rules. Ethical imagination encapsulates possibilities for change (even if these are sometimes masked as continuity). By ethical or moral I do not mean of course that decisions and judgements necessarily entail being ethical in the sense of contributing to some larger, notional good. Rather, this implies surveying the possible and exercising judgements in everyday ways and situations to take what may seem the least bad option available and to try to avoid obvious pitfalls and unhappiness. Thus, Haryath had wished to avoid the unhappiness and violence in her sister’s marriage, which had ended in divorce, while Lydia’s mother sought to escape the intensely difficult family circumstances of her upbringing in which her own widowed mother had lived under the authority of her in-laws. Sometimes, as in this case, people take radical, transformative steps to marry beyond the bounds of community or convention, or they may avoid marriage altogether.

Kinship in the stories examined here enables journeys across generations, constituting, in effect, a kind of time travel (see Carsten Reference Fardon, Harris, Marchand, Nuttall, Strang, Wilson and Bamford2019b; Shryock Reference Shryock2013). Crucially, however, kinship provides not just a mode of transport backwards and forwards through time enabled by intergenerational relations; it is also the relational and emotional content that motivates reflection, relative judgements and decisions. It is in this sense that considering marriage occurs in past, present and future tense (Carsten et al. Reference Carsten, Chiu, Magee, Papadaki and Reece2021). There are other noteworthy aspects of this temporal process. First, such judgements are relative: They encompass views about what may be better or worse conjugal relations, and they merge and distinguish subjective experience with what may seem to be more objective stances. As Ammara Maqsood (Reference Maqsood2024, 70) notes, ‘the work of time’ – with all its uncertainties – is crucial to the evaluative interpretation of events and relations, and to the negotiation and absorption of difference. The consideration of past, present and future relationships thus enfolds and generates ethical judgements and visions.

I see this study as a contribution to the anthropology of ethics because of the myriad ways in which envisioning a marriage and experiencing conjugality in everyday life require accommodating – or not – to the life of another. For many people, such accommodations and compromises (or their absence) impact the lives of a spouse’s close relatives as well as their own family members. Making small or larger compromises, confronting, overriding or ignoring the preferences, wishes or everyday habits of a spouse requires ethical judgements and decisions even if these are not articulated or explicit. As I have indicated, ‘ethical’ is used here in the broadest sense, which may or may not carry moral overtones as instilled in explicit rules and obligations (Lambek Reference Lambek and Lambek2010a); what may be better for me may or may not also be better for my spouse and vice versa.Footnote ⁵ Sometimes, but not always, reflections about relationships may explicitly take into account the expectations, preferences or visions of others, such as family or a wider community or society more broadly. The dual nature of marriage as at once an intimate relation and a public one permits – and even dictates – sometimes imperceptible transitions between different registers of the ethical, intimate and political. This was evident in the criticisms of many I spoke to, including Haryath, of increasing materialism and the proclivity for large, showy weddings among young people.

Engaging with the anthropology of ethics has brought me into conversation with the work of Veena Das and Michael Lambek, first, because of the attention they pay to everyday life, and their understanding of the ethical or moral, not as constituting a separate domain of existence, but as threaded through ordinary life. This sense, captured in what Michael Lambek (Reference Lambek2010b) has called ‘ordinary ethics’, has been central to the work of Veena Das (Reference Das2007; Reference Das and Lambek2010; Reference Das2018a; Reference Das, Laidlaw, Bodenhorn and Holbraad2018b; Reference Das2020). My engagement with the insights of this scholarship through the prism of marriage (rather than through violence, its threat and its aftermath, or lives lived in extreme poverty, as in Das’s work) is woven through this book. Kinship relations, as has been emphasised by James Faubion (Reference Faubion2001) and Robert McKinley (Reference McKinley, Feinberg and Oppenheimer2001), are an obvious arena for moral or ethical consideration, partly because of the altruism and consideration of close others that expectations and ideologies of kinship demand. For most people, kinship as it is lived and imagined is a realm of the everyday that is suffused with ethics. Here Cheryl Mattingly’s (Reference Mattingly2014) evocation of the ‘moral laboratories’ in which African American parents in Los Angeles reach decisions about what may be best for their children against a backdrop of heavy constraints is apt.Footnote ⁶

A further point that I take from the work of Veena Das is that, because of its embeddedness in ordinary life, ethical work may be inconspicuous, unarticulated and difficult to discern. Marital relations are frequently alluded to or discussed in Lambek’s and Das’s considerations of ordinary ethics and are central, for example, in Das’s discussion of the coming into being of a Hindu-Muslim marriage (Das Reference Das2020, Chapter 5). She pays close attention here to the ‘minute shifts in actions and dispositions … in which to inhabit the everyday’ (Reference Das2020, 170) on the part of a couple and their families, and to how these small changes have their histories and their sequelae that are part of ‘engaging the life of the other’. The ethical (and temporal) work of marriage, embedded as it is in ‘everyday’ or ‘ordinary’ life, may be, following Veena Das, (Reference Das2018a; Reference Das2020), difficult to track – not because it is purposefully hidden from view, but on the contrary, because it often occurs in mundane, sometimes unspoken or insignificant gestures, acts or contexts. Das alludes to how domestic relations, marriage, neighbourly ties and the taken for granted, repetitive and habitual, are zones ‘in which the life of the other is engaged’ (Reference Das2020, 15–16).Footnote ⁷ Notably, the meanings of words, actions, gestures and objects here may emerge or shift, taking on different forms, as they are reflected upon by the protagonists and by the ethnographer over many years (Das Reference Das2020, Chapter 4). Such inconspicuous shifts (rather than abstract moral judgements), she suggests, potentially hold the seeds of alternative possibilities in relations of care that move beyond the confines of given categorical imperatives and communal boundaries (Reference Das2020, 169–71). The pertinence of these insights for the experiences of marriage I discuss is evident in Chapter 3 and in Chapter 5 where I consider ‘mixed marriages’ in Penang, as well as in the final chapter, which focuses on how more public or activist stances may sometimes arise out of marital experiences.

What is clear from the accounts of marriage presented in this book is the centrality of relationality to ordinary ethics. As Webb Keane emphasises, ‘People don’t live moral life in the abstract, they live it within specific circumstances and social relations’ (Reference Keane2024, 11–12). This is in marked contrast to an anthropology of ethics which often seems to centre on a lone and heroic self-grappling to achieve ethical outcomes (see, for example, Laidlaw Reference Laidlaw2002). Here Jarrett Zigon’s call for a ‘relational ethics’ (Reference Zigon2021) appears initially promising, but I have found his work less helpful than might be expected for understanding the moral labour of marriage. Zigon (Reference Zigon2021, 390) proposes a relational ethics based on a phenomenological view of language and seems to misrecognise not only the importance of relations in the writings of Das and Lambek but also to ignore the emphasis they place on habitual actions and practices.

It is worth noting that marriage encompasses ethical work that, as well as being implicit and ongoing, embedded in the relational practices of a marriage, can also at times emerge in explicit and performative forms – for example, at a ‘vital conjuncture’ (Johnson-Hanks Reference Johnson-Hanks2002), such as deciding whom to marry or what kind of wedding to hold. The productive tension between these aspects of the ethical work of marriage, encompassing varied attitudes to sameness and difference, the public and the private, conformity and change, are part of what enables us, analytically, to tease out the transformative potentialities of marriage.Footnote ⁸ Ethical work may be directed simultaneously or separately at an expansion of relational personhood for the individual, at enhancement of familial relations and status, and towards broader communal concerns. In fact, these different aims and spheres, rather than being necessarily contradictory, may be mobilised to enable each other. Ammara Maqsood’s (Reference Maqsood2021) exposition of how middle-class women in Pakistan navigate the constraints of patriarchal authority within the existing norms of joint families to negotiate new marital possibilities is a case in point. Here expanding the possibilities of ‘love as understanding’ enables women to ‘use the very kin connections and family arrangements that otherwise inhibit them from imagining and building toward a new future’ (Maqsood Reference Maqsood2021, 94). Importantly, such expansions of zones of possibility come about, not by means of direct challenges to authority but through ‘traditional’ practices; nevertheless, she suggests, they reflect ‘a sense of hope and transformative desire’ (Maqsood Reference Maqsood2021, 102).

Imagination

In focusing on the importance of imagination in marriage, I have taken inspiration from the work of Phyllis Rose (Reference Rose2020 [1984]) on five Victorian literary marriages.Footnote ⁹ Through a feminist lens, Rose analyses marriage ‘as imaginative projections and arrangements of power’ (Rose Reference Rose2020, 16). While both power and imagination are fundamental to understanding marriage, the latter route has been less travelled by anthropologists. The ordinary ethics of marriage, as I highlight here, require imaginative work from their participants.Footnote ¹⁰ Inhabiting a marriage, as well as considering it in prospect or retrospect, requires placing a spouse, their relationships and histories, needs and preferences, alongside one’s own. The other may be given shorter or longer shrift, but the demands of conjugality are not simply or straightforwardly a habitus grown up with. As we begin to discern in Chapter 3, the degree to which a parental marriage provides a conjugal model in the next generation is partial and contingent; adjustments to and departures from it are possible. Conjugality is thus an intimate and long-term encounter with the new that is, at least to some degree, a subject of reflection, judgement and planning.

Notably, the imaginative demands of marriage is a topic familiar from the works of countless novelists and filmmakers – indeed one might say this has long been their particular terrain. From the novels of Jane Austen to the films of Pedro Almodóvar (to suggest just two from a seemingly limitless list of authors and film directors), the imaginative qualities demanded of familial and marital relations (though not necessarily met), and the variable and uncertain capacities of protagonists, are at the heart of such stories. Phyllis Rose includes the unconventional marital relations of George Eliot and of Charles Dickens, two of the most celebrated English nineteenth-century novelists, in her study of Victorian marriage, and I return to George Eliot in Chapter 7. The interiority of protagonists, their internal narratives and shifts of subjective perspective between different characters no doubt lend themselves particularly well to literary and cinematic genres. Nevertheless, it does seem surprising that imaginative aspects of relationality should be so rarely discussed in anthropological accounts.

My interest in experiences of marriage over time concerns not just objective changes or a focus on choices about whom to marry but also qualities of reflection, in other words, how people assess marriage and conjugality, and the judgements they make at the time, as well as retrospectively and prospectively. This connects with the temporality of marriage discussed earlier, a temporality that Cheryl Mattingly underlines for ‘projects of care’ more broadly. Such temporality leads Mattingly ‘to insist that there is an inherent narrativity to ethical practice and its self-constituting nature’ (Mattingly Reference Mattingly2014, 19). This, however, is not to suggest that such narratives necessarily provide coherence or order. Rather, for Mattingly,

Here Mattingly is concerned with what she refers to as the ‘narrative re-envisioning’ through which new ethical possibilities are imagined ‘in and through participation in social worlds’ (Mattingly Reference Mattingly2014, 20). Drawing on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre (Reference MacIntyre2013) and Charles Taylor (Reference Taylor1989), she specifically points to the role of narrative in actions, and to the entanglements of the ethical with the political in what she terms ‘moral laboratories’ (Mattingly Reference Mattingly2014, 17–25). This line of her argument is thus helpful in linking together the role of moral imagination in marriage with the narrative accounts which I present in the chapters that follow. It differs somewhat from the approach of Asha Abeyasekera who, drawing particularly on the work of Jerome Bruner (Reference Bruner1987; Reference Bruner1990), and Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps (Reference Ochs and Capps1996; Reference Ochs and Capps2001), argues that the narrative accounts of marriage she collected are part of a process of ordering and settling life events. By providing opportunities for reflection and resolving and clarifying discrepancies between different expectations or between expectations and actual outcomes, Abeyasekera argues, narratives about marriage construct meanings and make order, and this is not just an individual process but a collective one involving the audience (Abeyasekera Reference Abeyasekera2021, 22, 26, 153). Without ignoring this important ordering quality of narrative accounts, I want also to draw attention to their open-endedness and contribution to social transformation. Imagination, I suggest, is a key aspect of narrative.

The material I present in this book can be taken as a contribution to discussions about the role of narrative in the production of new or changing ethical imaginaries. Narrating accounts, whether to family members, consociates, social researchers or others, can be one expression of transformation, but, crucially, such narrations take place alongside, before or after actions and events that are their subject. In other words, they both express and contribute to transformative processes, but they are not the only way transformation occurs. In Chapter 7, I show how experiences of marriage may, directly or indirectly, lead to a trajectory of social activism in the field of gender relations with the explicit aim of bringing about communal or political change. Here we gain some sense of the complexity of possible trajectories of change.

The significance of imaginative capacities for kinship is of course not restricted to marital relations alone. In a quite different context, Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsburg have explored how parenting children with disabilities in the US brings about an expansion of kinship horizons for parents and ‘widen[s] the space of possibility in which relations can be imagined and resources claimed’ (Rapp and Ginsburg Reference Rapp and Ginsburg2001, 537). Here it is the immediate intimacy of encounters with difference that stimulates such imaginative work; the effects of this, however, are not necessarily limited to intimate familial zones but may produce new cultural forms that ‘create new social landscapes’ (Rapp and Ginsburg Reference Rapp and Ginsburg2001, 551). The connections Rapp and Ginsburg draw between kinship and social activism provide insights into how familial kinship may generate political change. For those I interviewed and spoke to in Penang, considering intergenerational marital experiences in their own families meant, above all, reflecting on gender relations between wives and husbands. Here the most marked and most commented-upon change over two or three generations has been the increasing tendency of women to enter tertiary education before marriage and after marriage to continue to work outside the home. This theme was present in Lydia’s and Haryath’s larger narratives – both had achieved tertiary education and both worked outside the home after marriage. It reflects wider patterns in Malaysia and beyond that were generally perceived as fundamentally altering the dynamics of conjugal relations. Women whose mothers worked, or who themselves work – in contrast to their mothers or grandmothers – were described as more independent, more autonomous and having more equal relations with their husbands. Although there were some variations, this was broadly the case across all ethnicities and religions. This fundamental shift, and the way it was spoken about by women and men, indicates too the expansion of imaginative horizons entailed for women about their own life course as well as those of their female forebears. But it prompted men too to imaginatively reconsider their ideals and expectations of women and wives in the past, present and future as they articulated these to me in conversations and interviews.

Imagination does not, however, always imply an expansion of possibilities, and there are limits and constraints to the potential for transformation. One area of possible change that is highly controversial in Malaysia, as in other parts of the world, is LGBTQ rights – an anathema to more conservative Muslims (for whom it has the capacity to galvanise anti-Western attitudes), but more acceptable in some form to many young, urban, middle-class liberals. This fracture, which starkly contrasts with radical changes in the acceptance of same-sex relations in Europe and North America, opens up questions about the political possibilities of intimate relations, or their perceived capacities for change. In Chapter 7, I consider the trajectories of women for whom marriage has provided an ambivalent template for gender relations, some of whom have remained or become unmarried. I connect their experiences with different kinds of community service as well as activism in women’s rights and LGBTQ contexts. Here the direct impact of family relations has propelled some women to devote time and energy to the service of wider improvement of marital and gender relations. Putting these ethnographic stories side by side with insights about ordinary ethics, imagination and time illuminates how political change may be generated through (sometimes negative) conjugal and familial experience. As Mattingly (Reference Mattingly2014, 24) has argued, ‘the ethical here is intimately intertwined with the political’.

The Chapters

The architecture of the chapters that follow is thematic, emerging ‘organically’ from my ethnographic encounters rather than predicated on pre-scripted sociological frames. While the detailed narratives are drawn from Penang, the debates and concerns are framed more widely to capture experiences of marriage beyond the narrow circumstances of the ethnography. In Chapter 1 I introduce a perhaps unexpected analogy between marriage and anthropology as encounters with difference, highlighting the transformative potential of both. Research on marriage in Penang drew me back to my first fieldwork on kinship and domestic relations in a fishing village on the island of Langkawi beginning in 1980. Reflecting on this long anthropological engagement with Malaysia, I trace some of the profound changes that have occurred there over the past decades. Recent fieldwork in urban Penang provides food for considering the very different contexts of research then and now and the concomitants of a long-term anthropological commitment.

In Chapter 2, to set the scene in urban Penang at the time of the research, I take up public discourses about marriage and gender relations – looking at newspaper accounts, public events, debates, exhibitions and theatrical productions in Penang’s capital, George Town. Bringing these together with interviews with lawyers in Penang, I show how discussions about what are perceived by many as ‘dysfunctional relations’ or deviations from ideal patterns, including child marriage, polygamy, the conversion of minors to Islam, divorce and LGBTQ rights, have the capacity to expand and take on a vibrant life of their own at moments of national tension. Dense and cross-cutting connections between ethnicity, religion and law in Malaysia, as in other parts of the world, intensify the porosity of each of these domains. The recapitulation of contestations around child marriage, for example, on the eve of Malaysian Independence and in 2018, suggests how marriage and gender relations can not only metaphorically stand for the nation but also vividly express and constitute national fractures and divisions over time. Such stories thus condense ethical and political concerns and contestations at times of radical change.

In Chapter 3, we take a closer look at the intimate world of the family through an intergenerational lens. Education and work outside the home are understood by many women to have fundamentally altered the dynamics of conjugality over several decades. Variations in individual life courses, availability of resources, education and ethnic or religious backgrounds partly shape trajectories of life and marriage. Exploring continuity and change between generations, we see how marriage encapsulates both possibilities, enabling radical departures from conventional norms under the guise of conformity as well as the replication of past patterns. Here, the binary of ‘arrangement’ versus ‘choice’ constitutes, simultaneously, a reference point and a somewhat misleading way to calibrate transformation – as anthropologists of South Asia have shown (Abeyasekera Reference Abeyasekera2021; Donner Reference Donner2016; Fuller and Narasimhan Reference Fuller and Narasimhan2008; Osella Reference Osella2012; Parry Reference Parry2020, Chapter 11). Beyond this, we see how marriages mark time, and are a means to tell and reflect upon family histories. Efforts to change the course of events or escape cycles of misfortune may be rare and difficult to achieve. Reflecting on differences and change across generations engages qualities of moral imagination, and is part of making history.

A comparison of the trajectories of two women from different generations, ethnic and religious backgrounds is the subject of Chapter 4. Both were to a considerable degree ‘self-made’ women, and the question raised in this chapter is, how is marriage relevant to their success? As elsewhere in this book, the stories that these women tell are replete with ethical judgements and reflections on their own and their parents’ marriages as well as those about others. Part of what is of interest here is the intriguingly tangential significance of marriage. Apparently a necessary part of a normative life course even in an unconventional scenario, marriage here takes forms that are at once accepted and ‘transgressive’. Both women had married foreign husbands; in one case, this ended in divorce; in the other, what seemed a successful partnership has endured. We see how marriage allows the expansion of convention but, paradoxically, also reinforces social norms. Indeed, at the boundaries of difference and what is acceptable, marriage has the capacity – as the work of Perveez Mody (Reference Mody2008) in India has shown – to be re-enfolded into what is normative through its conventionality. It can hold a promise of transformation for individuals, families and wider communities and nations.

Chapter 5 takes forward the exploration of difference through an examination of what are locally perceived as ‘mixed’ marriages. Of course, difference can be calibrated in many registers – for example, those of age, wealth, class, familial background, religion, language, ‘race’ and ethnicity. The cultural and ethnic diversity of Penang offers unusual scope for marrying outside familiar boundaries. In this chapter, I consider which sorts of difference are most salient, which boundaries are more permeable and which are easier to bridge. ‘Malayness’ and Islam have a historically privileged legal status in Malaysia, and marrying a Muslim legally requires a non-Muslim spouse to convert. The bodily, culinary, religious and legal concomitants of this conversion are likely to impact close family members – especially the parents and siblings of a non-Muslim partner (see Kessler Reference Kessler, Kahn and Wah1992, 139). At the extreme end of a range of possibilities, ‘mixed’ couples encountering or expecting opposition from their families sometimes elope to marry. But after marriage, a long process of accommodation and absorption is likely to occur. Experiences of ‘mixed’ marriage and the negotiation of difference, which is part of marriage everywhere, offer a perspective on other changes in Malaysia over several decades. More broadly, it also provides a way to understand how intimate worlds may generate wider social transformation.

Although many people marry in order to provide a secure future, there are no guarantees this will be assured. In Chapter 6, we look at forms of marital uncertainty occurring at different stages of married life. A central question here is what does uncertainty produce? The chapter focuses partly on Malay protagonists, and on two particularly fragile moments in Malay marriage: during betrothal and, counter-intuitively, much later on, after several decades when one might expect marriages to be highly stable. The former was a pattern with which I was familiar from earlier research. But some older Malay women spoke to me of a more recently emerging trend – for husbands of many years to marry a younger woman polygamously. Meanwhile, other non-Malay couples have adopted unconventional living arrangements or have taken unusual paths to suit their particular circumstances. In considering how different kinds of marital uncertainty play out, the significance of expectations about marriage and the registers of temporality through which they are calibrated and recalibrated are illuminated. The force of unanticipated events stimulates the reflection of protagonists and their consociates – as readers may recognise from their own experiences – reformulating ideas of what is appropriate or acceptable behaviour, and precipitating new ethical stances.

The final chapter returns us to an examination of the import of marriage at the interface between intimate, personal lives and wider political transformation. Highlighting the experiences of those who have remained unmarried beyond the usual marrying age, I build on discussions of ethical imagination from earlier in the book by exploring submerged connections between non-marriage and activism. The multiple temporalities in which reflecting on marriage occurs (here by those who remain unmarried) reveal how such judgements constitute imaginative and political work. Involvement in gender-related activism is a possible trajectory for those concerned about women’s or LGBTQ rights. The potential fractures between conservative Islam and the more liberal attitudes of urban, middle-class, youthful Malaysians constitute a zone of contention – but also, for some, a suggestive field for imaginative reflection about their own situation, about the marriage of their parents or those of siblings or friends. In these fissures, transformative standpoints and visions may carry the seeds of wider political change.

Neither Lydia nor Haryath, whose accounts I have briefly referred to, and who will reappear towards the end of this book, were political activists. Nevertheless, as older women, both were highly engaged in community life. In one sense ‘ordinary’, in that neither had achieved exceptional fame or status, one could equally well say both were remarkable in the way that many life stories, when examined closely, reveal extraordinary conjunctures, qualities and talents, resilience or tenacity. Both women showed a disposition to reflect on their own marriage and those of others through time and generations. This exercise of relational and moral imagination is at once completely ordinary and also, through the possibilities it engenders to create and absorb change, transformative. It is at the heart of marriage as an intimate and deeply political relation. It is also, as I argue in Chapter 1, at the heart of doing anthropology.